Effective Leaders Choose to be Coached – Here’s Why

Effective leaders know that to maintain their edge they need to see their edge – and beyond.
They recognize that if they can’t see their own blind spots, patterns and world views, they’ll be making decisions based on erroneous information. Acting on what they believe to be true, rather than on what is actually true, is a great way to guarantee muddy results.

Effective leaders know intuitively that self-awareness is the key to creating desirable results. Coaching is all about developing that deeper awareness by revealing what cannot otherwise be seen.

As a busy executive or professional, you’re already a life-long learner. But how aware are you? Are you applying your curiosity to yourself? Your patterns?

So how does coaching help leaders?

Coaching is the one place where you can explore what you truly want – with no fear of being judged or found wanting. You can question your own point of view in confidence, and play with alternate ways of seeing your experience. You get to learn how to think flexibly, learn about your strengths, face your challenges and discover the wisdom you already have.

Coaching is the process that supports you in finding your own answers. You learn to be your own best ally by regularly exploring how to make your deeper knowing sustainable across time. Over time, you learn to trust yourself in a new way.

How effective is it?

A client told me recently that she was awestruck at how effective a single coaching conversation was for her.

Another had tears in her eyes when she shared her gratitude for quickly making a deep connection about a pattern that she’d been trying to understand for decades. That’s how powerful the coaching process can be.

If you’re serious about transforming your business or your career outcomes, give yourself this gift.

5 Reasons Why Coaching Works – and Why it’s Worth It

1. Effective learning occurs when you construct new information on what you already know. You know you love to learn, but you don’t learn by being told. You learn by our own experience. Coaching questions are designed to deepen your understanding of your experience.
2. Coaching conversations put you in charge. You get to choose the topic and where you want to go. In this way, you expand your agency and your self-trust.
3. Coaches model a powerful executive functioning skill called ‘meta-cognition’ – the skill for directing your thoughts and actions even in the most trying circumstances. Once you become aware of this inner voice, and you learn how to use it effectively, you’ll have it with you forever. You can’t ‘unlearn’ awareness.
4. The coaching process creates new neural pathways for creative and flexible thinking. You get to practice exploring, questioning, considering, and creating without having to commit to any one answer. Once you’ve learned how to think flexibly, and you’ve practiced asking yourself, “What other way could I look at this?” you’ll always have that skill available to you.
5. When you choose to coach, your personal growth is transformative. The changes are deep and they last. When you change your language, your perceptions, and your limiting beliefs, you literally become who you were always meant to be.

Transformational change in business begins with the leader’s self-awareness. Having a grand vision is inspiring, but it isn’t enough to make that vision come true. Robust self-knowledge is the key to finding the best strategies, applying them at the best time and place, and being flexible enough to adapt well as things evolve.